Roundup: Open Compute Summit 2013

Attendees to the Open Compute Summit IV converse at the Avnet booth. (Photo by Colleen Miller.)

Last week’s Open Compute Summit produced a steady stream of news, as activity picks up on the open hardware movement. Here’s a look back at our coverage of the event and news announcements:

Rackspace: We’ll Fill Data Centers With Open Compute Gear – From this point forward, all new servers added to the Rackspace Cloud will run on Open Compute hardware, one of the largest commitments to hardware designs based on the Open Compute Project. “Every expansion for our cloud business will be 100 percent Open Compute hardware,” Rackspace chief operating officer Mark Roegnik said in an interview with Data Center Knowledge.

Facebook Builds Exabyte Data Centers for Cold Storage – What do you do with an exabyte of digital photos that are rarely accessed? That was the challenge facing Jay Parikh and the storage team at Facebook. The answer? A dedicated data center at its Prineville, Oregon campus that could house older photos in a separate “cold storage” system that dramatically slash the cost of storing and serving these files. The facility has no generators or UPS systems, but can house up to an exabyte of data.

Scenes from Day 1 of Open Compute Summit – The first day of the Open Compute Project Summit IV drew a crowd of 1,900 hardware and technology professionals to the Santa Clara Convention Center. Here’s a photo gallery of the first day.

Open Compute: Momentum Builds for Open Hardware – Perhaps the best sign of the progress made by the Open Compute Project is that companies as diverse as Rackspace Hosting, Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs are all running servers based on these “open hardware” designs in their data centers. In less than two years, the Open Compute Project (OCP) has grown far beyond its origins as a showcase for Facebook’s design innovations, evolving into an active community building cutting-edge hardware, disrupting the traditional IT supply chain, and laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Fusion-io Sets the Stage for the All-Flash Data Center – Fusion-io (FIO) announced its newest product line, Fusion ioScale. Aimed at the hyperscale and cloud companies, ioScale provides up to 3.2 terabytes of ioMemory capacity, and is available to order in a minimum of one hundred units. Pricing starts as low as $3.89 per gigabyte, with increasing discounts based on volume.

Emerson Adapts Open Compute, Eyes HyperScale Market– In the first two years of the Open Compute Project’s initiative to bring open design standards to hyperscale data centers, vendors of power and cooling products have been notable for their absence. Not so with the 2013 Open Compute Summit, as Emerson Network Power was on hand to show off a rack solution that integrates power distribution and back-up concepts in the Open Rack specification, created with off-the-shelf components.

AMD Rolls Out Open Compute Servers for Wall Street – If Facebook and the world’s largest financial services companies got together to build a server, what might it look like? The answer can be seen in new servers being unveiled today based on the AMD Open 3.0 platform, which was developed through the Open Compute Project. The hardware, which AMD calls “a radical rethinking of the server motherboard,” will be on display today at the 2013 Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. It is also being evaluated in data centers at Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs.

Hyve Unveils Open Compute Servers and Storage – Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation (SNX), rolled out Open Compute Project compliant hardware at Tuesday’s Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit, which drew 1,900 participants. Many attendees at the event held in Santa Clara, CA were at the company’s booth reviewing the production-grade rack which was on hand. Riot Games, an online PC game developer and publisher whose flagship title is “League of Legends,” is using Hyve’s OCP hardware within its data center environment.

Calxeda Rolls Out ARM-Based Open Vault Storage – The Open Compute Project is getting some ARM-powered hardware, but perhaps not where you’d expect. Calxeda today introduced Project Knockout, which teams its low-power processors with the Open Vault storage system.

We spent some time on the expo floor having video conversations looking at some of the latest innovations. Watch for those on DCK this week.

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About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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